🕶 Metaproof Fashion

Gm fashionistas! This is Sophia from 🕶 Metaproof Fashion, the weekly newsletter where we update you on how the metaverse & web3 are changing the fashion industry.

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💌 A quick thanks to our friends…

This edition is sponsored by the OG metaverse fashion peeps The Fabricant. They have been deep down the metaverse fashion rabbit hole since 2018 and are pioneers in every sense of the word. They are on a mission to change the fashion industry and are making great progress - check them out today!

📲 By the numbers

• Metaverse: 67% of Gen Z users feel avatars should better reflect diversity in body types, clothes, and skin tones in 2023

• Finance: ⅔ of Gen Z plans to use social media to make money

• Sustainability: Over 50% of Gen Z respondents say they plan to DIY their clothes

• Climate change: 2 out of 3 Gen Z shoppers plan to purchase skincare or beauty products shielding them from extreme weather and sun

Findings from an Instagram’s Gen-Z 2023 trend report surveying the 16-24 age range on topics frequenting the platform

📫 News & trends

🌍 H&M launches Innovation Metaverse Design Story collection at the Fashion Awards 2022

At the globally celebrated red carpet event, Swedish design house H&M showcases 10 looks from its new Metaverse Design Story collection, donned by no less than Irina Shayk, Kim Petra, Alva Claire, Leomie Anderson, Shay Mitchell, Lucien Laviscount, Manu Ríos, and other models and personalities.

Designed to reflect the blurred lines between IRL personalities and the people we’ve become in online spaces, the collection fulfills the fantasy of avatar fashion while emphasizing practicality as well as sustainability. The circularity-focused collection features recycled polyester fibers, recycled sequins from plastic bottle waste, and production techniques including zero-waste pattern cutting. Five augmented reality filters figure in the digital collection, available on the H&M app marked by AR fashion lenses and virtual try-ons.

Mitchell calls her dress “super fun,” blending “the surreal nature of the metaverse with the functionality of the real world,” while H&M assortment designer Ella Soccorsi says the “progressive” collection is inspired by endless modes of self-expression that the metaverse and virtual reality can afford fashionistas globally.

H&M's foray in the metaverse is a major development as the multinational brand rakes in revenues of more than $20B annually. Industry insiders highlight this type of metaverse involvement of one of the world's largest fashion brands - with its event models and celebrities alone collectively pulling in over 70 million Instagram followers - as a fast route toward mainstream adoption of metaverse fashion.

The clothing retailer has reported a net sales growth of 3% to $5.17B in the third quarter of 2022, compared with $5.01B in the same period in 2021, along with a drop in profit for Q3 as it exited the Russian market.

🌇 How Metaverse Fashion Week is upping its game: interoperable wearables, cross metaverse teleporting, avatar supermodel

Decentraland has announced Metaverse Fashion Week’s return on March 28 to 31 in 2023, teasing a wealth of cross metaverse partnerships, interoperable wearables, teleporting between metaverses, an avatar “supermodel” ambassador, as well as CFDA recognition of sorts. Pioneered alongside immersive art and culture platform UNXD, the virtual event will follow the renowned IRL runways of New York, London, Milan, and Paris, with partnerships with two additional metaverses: photorealistic Spatial and ARAR-1.5% enabled OVER.

💋 Maybelline New York takes on the metaverse

In its entry to the metaverse, the world’s biggest makeup brand has sponsored a digital fashion contest dubbed “Fashioning Masculinity.” Seeking to “reflect on the redefinition of dressing masculine identities,” the competition is part of Maybelline’s collaboration with Ready Player Me on makeup looks for metaverse avatars, in partnership with hairstyles from sister label L’Oréal Professionnel. Maybelline wants to mirror its strategy in the physical realm, where it provides makeup to the fashion world when fashion designers battle it it out in competitions.

👚 The metaverse fashion stylists are here

You can’t touch digital fabric. You can’t even see them if you’re not on Decentraland or Roblox. Metaverse stylists, however, are increasingly in demand as curious users seek help dressing their avatars. Learn more about digital stylists who balance their metaverse clients with real-world gigs; they have stuck it out with the 3D virtual world, a fast-growing space where in 2022, over 11.5 million creators made 62 million clothing and accessory items on Roblox alone.

🤳 Snapchat AR Lens helps British Fashion Council celebrate artists through immersive experience

Snap and the British Fashion Council (BFC) have unveiled the first AR Snapchat Lens in celebration of BFC’s 2022 New WAVE: Creatives, a group of innovative creative talents from around the globe. The new Lens allows Snapchatters to enjoy The Fashion Awards from anywhere in the world while red-carpet guests immerse themselves in the artworks via Snap’s AR Mirrors, both of them allowed to move from one experience to another when they activate an icon using body tracking. According to Snap, over 250 million people engage with AR on Snapchat daily - “a canvas to make fashion accessible to everyone.”

💚 Diving into digital: Our favorite fashion NFT and web3 projects of November 2022

Designer Charli Cohen unveils digital fashion platform RSTLSS, built for and by its community, to sell multiverse fashion. With a first drop that includes the digital, customizable jacket “The Key,” RSTLSS offers creations that can be used across gaming, metaverse, and AR/VR social, as well as redeemed as a custom 1/1 physical garment. Vegan footwear brand LØCI also sticks to its eco-conscious production ethos with a design competition for gamers and sneakerheads from online sneaker world Aglet to submit their digital sneaker designs. The winning entries will be turned into IRL sneakers going on sale in 2023.

💻 Fashion in the Metaverse: what Avatars are wearing

Digital fashion retailer DressX is having a ball creating pieces for avatars and images. Co-founders Natalia Modenova and Daria Shapovalova are intent on producing creations that are often futuristic, conceptual, or structural, making physical versions impossible for humans to wear. In July, DressX became the first digital-only fashion company to provide apparel for Meta’s avatar-fashion marketplace, along with Prada and Balenciaga.

🔮 How Farfetch is predicting the future of fashion in Web3

Fashion, a “deeply human endeavor,” is people’s second persona and technology should therefore be at the service of it, notes Farfetch founder and CEO José Neves on The Most Innovative Companies podcast. Neves says web3 comes naturally to Fartech in its aim to innovate for customers and retailers: the use cases are “endless,” and principles of user control, user ownership, and decentralized architecture are all applied to fashion.

🧨 Balmain’s Web3 Villa, Fila teams up with Tmall, Puma x Staffonly, and more: Web3 drops of the week

Another week, another busy time for web3 drops and collaborations in fashion. Balmain launches its metaverse mansion “Villa Balmain,” a digital rendition of Pierre Balmain’s IRL property built in the late 1950s, and artist-architect Alexandre Arrechea takes his partnership with the luxury house up a notch with four digitally animated masks (with Swarovski-encrusted physical mask counterparts) inspired by Villa Balmain’s honeycombs. Sportswear giant Puma also taps the Chinaverse for its next virtual move, collaborating with local sensation Staffonly on a futuristic digital sneaker collection running on an avant-garde design.

₿ At 2022’s close, all quiet on the crypto fashion front

The first quarter of the year has heard talks of accepting cryptocurrencies at department stores, offering a glimpse of what an NFT market might look like. What follows, however, is a limited direct integration of crypto across fashion, at least in Japan: Gucci accepting a limited number of digital currencies for payment at their US boutiques, the general volatility of Bitcoin and other currencies, and the low number of NFT transactions by the third quarter. These growing pains won’t entirely take web3 off the industry’s radar, but going a little easy on the hype might do some good.

🎥 Breaking down Stephanie Hsu’s chaotic fashions across the metaverse in ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’

Jobu Tupaki, the all-powerful being battling Michelle Yeoh in the new mind-bending sci-fi thriller and family dramedy, gave actor Stephanie Tsu the chance to wear an incredible collection of costumes designed by Shirley Kurata. “It was a pretty great embodiment of angst and darkness,” according to Kurata, a celebrated editorial and fashion stylist. From nods to Harajuku street style to an homage to Asian matriarchs, see this quick breakdown of Bagel Universe Jobu’s looks in the film.

💸 Finance buzz

• Fashion and luxury goods are projected to contribute $50 billion to the metaverse, currently valued at $40B to $65B and would be worth $13 trillion by 2030 (Source)

• Global fashion sales are expected to grow 5% to 10% for luxury, and -2% to 3% for the rest of the industry in 2023 (Source)

🗣️Quote of the week

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